Al Gore, U.N. Panel win Nobel Peace Prize

Former vice president and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change awarded for raising awareness of global warming.

October 12 2007: 5:29 AM EDT

OSLO, Norway (CNN) -- The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Friday "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change."

The IPCC and Gore will split the $1.5 million that goes along with the honor. The award ceremony will be held Dec. 10 in Oslo, Norway.

"Through the scientific reports it has issued over the past two decades, the IPCC has created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming," Ole Danbolt Mjoes, chairman of the Nobel committee, said in making the announcement.

"Thousands of scientists and officials from over one hundred countries have collaborated to achieve greater certainty as to the scale of the warming."

The Nobel committee praised Gore as being "one of the world's leading environmentalist politicians."

According to Mjoes, "He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted."

Previous American recipients of the peace prize include former presidents Jimmy Carter in 2002, Woodrow Wilson in 1919 and Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. In 1973, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger shared the award with North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho. The Rev. Martin Luther King received the honor in 1964.

Last year, the Nobel committee awarded the prize to Bangladeshi banker Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank, a bank he founded, "for their efforts to create economic and social development from below." Grameen provides credit to "the poorest of the poor in rural Bangladesh without any collateral."